Bax has recently expanded its expert support for the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Partnership. In this article, we provide an update on the impact of our ongoing collaboration.
In July 2024, Bax strengthened its commitment to progressing Europe’s sustainable urban future with the launch of a four-year collaboration with the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) Partnership. Following over a year of guidance and development, we are pleased to see this collaboration taking form and delivering concrete value.
Building on the initial collaboration, Bax has since expanded its expert support for the DUT Partnership. We have played a central role in shaping DUT’s updated strategic roadmap and are now guiding DUT projects towards practical outputs and innovations. Through this work, Bax is helping DUT—one of Europe’s key initiatives for sustainable urban transitions—refine its strategy and unlock the potential of tools designed to maximise impact.
From vision to action: a new Theory of Change
To support the DUT Partnership in updating its Strategic Roadmap published earlier this year, Bax designed and facilitated a comprehensive Theory of Change workshop.
During the workshop, we guided participants in defining the long-term vision they wanted to move towards: What does DUT ultimately want to enable? Building from this shared vision, we worked backwards, to identify the outcomes DUT must deliver to achieve it. These included building a robust Innovation Portfolio from funded projects and strengthening the link between research, innovation, and urban policy and practice.
This process created a clear red line, linking DUT’s daily activities and outputs directly to its high-level mission and vision.
Aligning urban Transition Pathways with Europe’s ambitions
With the strategic framework set, the Bax team contributed in-depth research and development for Roadmap chapters on two of DUT’s Transition Pathways: Circular Urban Economies (CUE) and Positive Energy Districts (PED).
Bax researched the state-of-the-art in the rapidly changing European environment, aligning the pathways with Europe’s latest strategic ambitions. We also reformulated the Key Areas of Impact, which will guide future Call topics and DUT project development.
- For Circular Urban Economies, we highlighted the central role of urban resource management in Europe’s future economy and emphasised the need to restore ecosystems, habitats, and species to strengthen resilience to both financial and environmental impacts.
- For Positive Energy Districts, we found that neighbourhood-scale clean energy systems are already both technically and politically viable, but remain stuck in the pilot trap without scalable commercial models able to effectively balance economic, social, and environmental issues.
Uniting projects in Milan
In October 2025, representatives from all ongoing DUT projects came together in Milan to connect and work together towards successful project results. Bax facilitated a large-scale workshop, bringing together 190 participants in person and 30 online, to explore how each DUT-funded project contributes to the partnership’s core vision: a climate-neutral and resilient future for all.
We guided participants through a hands-on session to define their project mission statements, identify their main outputs, and specify their users. The workshop’s aim was twofold: to provide a space for thematic exchanges across projects and to actively connect individual project work to the larger DUT strategy.
Driving impact through the DUT Knowledge Hub and Innovation Portfolio
This flagship workshop was organised in the context of two key instruments of the DUT Partnership, both actively supported by Bax: the Knowledge Hub and the Innovation Portfolio.
The Knowledge Hub, co-led by Bax, is DUT’s primary instrument for gathering its knowledge community, capitalising on project results, and facilitating the transfer of those results to practitioners.
The Innovation Portfolio is used by DUT to promote the most promising solutions produced by its projects, ensuring they are widely promoted to enable greater impact. Bax is responsible for the selection and evaluation of these solutions.
Our continued, hands-on involvement—from shaping high-level strategy through the Theory of Change to engaging directly with project teams in Milan—solidifies Bax’s position at the forefront of challenge-driven urban innovation. We are proud to be a key partner in building the framework and mechanisms that turn Europe’s ambitious urban goals into tangible, impactful solutions.
